It has been in the jungle that I have finally watched a football game with the locals…and, apart for the fact that my team lost, it was an experience itself.

Football is everywhere in Africa

Football in Africa is like daily food. The most common t-shirts guys wear in the street are football shirts, of all times and of all teams. But two teams are the most loved all around Africa: one is A.C. Milan and the other is Barcelona. Most of the t-shirts weared by boys and men are of these two teams, and you can well imagine how it was last week when both teams were playing each other in the Champions League. Everyone was wearing these 2 shirt and could be easily recognized as a supporter. Everytime I tell them I support A.C. Milan it’s like a connection created wit them, a connection that goes beyond any kind of barrier you can have between people. In Africa football as the power to link the people together like anywhere else in the world, not even in our football fanatic countries!

Luckily, we were in Macenta, a pretty big village of the Guinean jungle, when there was the match of Champions League. And luckily we found also a petty decent hotel where we could set our tends on and most of all have a shower, even if it was from the well of the courtyard. It was great and after 3 days without showering we all felt clean and fresh again. Well, it didn’t last long though!

The young kid of the hotel brought us to a place where the football place was shown. It was kind of a house, with benches inside, like in a church, and on a wall a small television. That house, however, was hot, very hot. The roof was made of corregated iron, like the ones of most the houses here, and there were no windows to make the air circulating. Getting inside there was like getting inside a steam room, we were not even arrive at the bench, at the back of the room and we were already sweating like pigs.

The tiny tv in the dark house where we watched the football

At the beginning it was really impossible to concentrate. The TV was too small and you could barely see the screen, the heat was unbelievable and, last but not least, everyone in the room was screaming and yelling loudly at the TV that it seemed more like they were gonna have a fight rather than they were watching a football match. After a while we got used to it as well, and understood that’s just the African way to watch football. Forget being sit in a pub, watching the match on a big screen with a fresh pint of beer, but rather imagine a small boiling room packed with people screaming at the TV from the beginning to the end of the match. Like most of the things in Africa, football is a social event, you watch it with others and most of all you participate as loud as you can. Unfortunately my team lost badly that night, but it was great to see how the people celebrated every goal of Barca in an explosions of laugh, screams and jumps all over the room. We were literally in the middle of a human hurricane and at every goal it was an explosion of joy that was impossible not to get involved to.

Watching and sweating football with Thor and Anna Begga

After the first half it was a relief to get out of the room and breath again. And getting back in again after 15 minutes, was the worse of all the nightmares. Suddenly, during the match, the electricity went off. People started to scream and fight with each other, in the darkness. The young guy who was supposed to work there and who was trying to get the TV working again was kicked out of the room by the people in the first row, who managed to set the electricity on again with big relief by everyone, and most of all by us probably. It was just crazy, as only Africa and its people can be. But it was great, and when it finished I was almost happy my team lost, as at least I won’t have to do all this again!

The day after, we left Macenta and got on our way to a 3 days of bush camping in the wild of the jungle. Everytime we were approaching a bigger village we were stopping around lunch time to get some food and buy some vegetables for the evening.

Trees of the jungle

We have been camping in some of the most remote and wild places of Guinea and in some of them it was been amazing. We stayed two days in Boussou, where we camped just outside a chimp sanctuary on one of the coal hills. The heat of that place during the day was barely sustainable, but as everytime happens in the Guinea jungle, at 5pm it started to rain and refresh everything. We spent all the afternoon laying on the grass, unable to do anything except for waiting for the rain to arrive. Then, after the daily storm, everything got much better and finally we could go to the town to check out the local life. A festival was supposed to be on that night, according to one of the local, but except for a bunch of people who danced all night long and a guy with a speaker who spoke constantly until the morning and who could have been heard even in the nearest village ( I could barely sleep that night) the festival was not the hit of the day. One day, I and Jon went to look for some food and when we asked the woman at the stall if she made omelette, she instead took a box f gunpowder and asked: “This one?”

nature was vibrating ife in the jungle

When we left, we then head to the border with Ivory Coast, and after the bureaucratic stuff to be done on both the borders we camped next to the police station just at the beginning of the Ivory Coast. That night, I and some others went to look for a fresh beer in town, and on the way we met some local guys who offered us to bring us to a bar. When we got there the bar was closed, but they started to knock so loud at the door that the guy inside woke up and opened the bar for us. There we spent our first night in Spilou, Ivory Coast.

Gunnar shared his magic tricks with the guys, while one of them kept petting Sam’s hair, finding them very soft, I suppose. They were sweet and curious, they welcomed us in the most friendly way ever, and escorted at the camp site when it started to rain and we had to go back.

Sunset

Then it came the jungle, the one of Ivory Coast, filled of palms and bananas, and even greener that Guinea, if ever possible. The only bad side was that the 5pm belated rain had finished at the border, and for the last two nights we have been camping in the bush with hot and humid temperatures, and lots of mosquitoes.

Manioca and fried bananas

It was beautiful though: so remote and isolated, right in the middle and part of the flourishing nature of the Tropics. At night the stars and the fireflies were enlightening the deep darkness and I found looking at them mesmerizing, at that poetry of the Nature, so alive and beautiful. Yes, Beauty surrounded us and for a night and made us become part of it, right in the heart of Africa, of the world. Because Africa is the heart of the world, and you get it only when you are here, when you get into it, feel its heart biting to the sound of the drums, or in the colours of the leaves. When they say we all come from Africa they are right. We all belong to it. The feeling here is that this places comes before anything else in the world. It’s primordial and it still has the vibes and energy of the primordial ages, its pure breath, its ancient splendour.

Landscapes of the jungle

The jungle has been a great experience of life and colours and its people, amazing people that come to shake your hand and touch your skin, as they may have probably never seen a white person before. You feel white in the jungle, and the kids remember it to you all the time when you get somewhere and they start to scream “white“. Even when we have been crossing a tiny village, they follow the truck screaming of joy and greeting us with a smile. This is the heart of Africa, where luckily we all belong to.